Conclusion

It is in this circuitous way that European imperialism can, even from the weak position it occupied in Africa, produce no small amount of violence. Arendt puts her emphasis on the undermining of liberal values, a point that she'll develop further in her problematic effort to distinguish violence, power and the law in On Violence (notions that do not easily separate themselves).

But Origins provides rich suggestions for understanding how the transposition of distinct norms and values contributed to transgression and a generalised climate of normlessness. If many of Arendt's conclusions and assumptions prove not satisfying, the questions she poses to her sources and framing of the project are worth consideration. In this sense I see Arendt less in need of a ‘historical turn', as some have proposed, than I see the importance of the history of violence making a self-reflexive theoretical turn.⁵⁴ In this case, Arendt helps historians see that general rules and ‘origins' of violence are not reliably deduced from individual events, any more than individual events can be understood separately from larger processes. How they come together in fateful, contingent episodes provides historians with some of their most meaningful understandings of violence, large and small.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

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